Disorderly Content

This is why I love the web. Oliver Laric took 787 pieces of clip art and made them into a movie. Not much of a plot, but it sure is purty.

(Found on Drawn!)

From Drawn!, a favorite website covering all things graphical, comes a whole 'nother area of art for which I wish I had the talent and the patience: knitwear. But not normal knitware, the kind my mom made for something like sixty years. No, this is sick and twisted knitwear, almost Pythonesque in its violation of one of the few remaining unsullied arts. Which I imagine is the point: to boldly go where no man of taste has gone before.

Update 01/31: Drawn! has corrected their story, and so must I. The crocheted (not knit) horrors were the work of Patricia Waller, who features them on her website. I've removed the link from my original post; we certainly don't want to give the content thief any more visitors.

Today wasn't all ABBA and Brazilian barbecue, I'll have you know. I also paid a visit to the Museum of Modern Art. Which I may have been to once before, back when I was a schoolboy and went where they made me go. This time it was my idea. Okay, I lie. It was actually Elke's idea; she was the one two told me about the Pixar exhibit and how I just had to go. So I did. She frightens me.

The Pixar exhibit consisted of conceptual art, some maquettes (3D models that are then scanned in and manipulated digitally), a movie that took hand-drawn art and added animation to it and the coolest zoetrope I've ever seen. A zoetrope is a model that you spin and then apply a strobe light to get a realistic looking animation. This one was incredibly detailed, with Toy Story characters playing leapfrog, waving, parachuting and probably some other stuff I can't remember. And there was a wall-sized mural of all sorts of fish from Finding Nemo. Interestingly, they were named after characters from The Dukes of Hazzard, Gilligan's Island, Starsky & Hutch and other examples of entertainment. If that's the right word.

The rest of the museum is pretty interesting as well. I particularly like the industrial exhibits, although the photographic galleries didn't do much for me. I much prefer the one at the Mumm winery in Napa. They also have better bubbly than MoMA. But I suspect you knew that.

It's nice to know that I'm not the only obsessive/compulsive with way too much time on his hands. How else to explain Doug Gilford, who scanned in every cover of Mad Magazine since 1952 and put them on the Web. It's also why I love Drawn!, which thought this was so cool they had to share the news.

I've mentioned my hobby of making pins for my Scaper friends before. The latest pin's at right; it's Dominar Rygel XVI by way of the Fairly OddParents. Announcing the new pin on a couple of the Farscape boards led to a question about possibly doing charms. Not knowing anything about charms, and especially about their manufacture, I went back to the firms I'd used for my pins to see if they did that sort of the thing. And was very surprised to see that one of the makers is using one of my designs as an example of their custom work. I know that I was impressed when I first saw the pulse pistol I'd commissioned. I guess the artist thought it was pretty cool as well.

Many years ago, I was working for a computer company called Symbolics that was based in Cambridge, Mass. Heading to lunch one day, I saw a beat up car with a cardboard sign announcing "No Radio", presumably to keep car radio thieves from doing further damage to the vehicle. "Wouldn't it be fun", I enquired of my colleagues, "to break in and install one?"

I was reminded of this by a report on Gridskipper about a British street artist named Bansky who's been having fun sneaking into art museums and adding his work to the collections. His latest attacks are in my old home town, New York City. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art have discovered his efforts and removed the evidence. At the time of the posting, the Brooklyn Museum and Museum of Natural History, a childhood favorite of mine, haven't noticed. Or maybe they just like it.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the pointer to this site full of rock band fonts. Although I'll never find a use for them, just like all the hundreds of other fonts I've collected over the years.

That's sick! (But in a good way.) An artist named Michael Paulus has taken a range of cartoon characters from Betty Boop to Pikachu and shown us what they have going on under the skin. Creative, funny and disturbing all at the same time.

Thanks to Boing Boing and others for reporting this one.